


Outdwelling

by genarti



Category: Tale of the Five Series - Diane Duane
Genre: F/M, Linear time is for humans, Non-human POV, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 13:17:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/pseuds/genarti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hasai, in the months after the King of Arlen's crowning.  (And, in the ways of Dragons, in the centuries before.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outdwelling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deifire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deifire/gifts).



> Longe ago, in the dayes of World-winnyng itt was, that Nhatain Barin's sonne did put stonnes upon stonnes and build him thee first Wardensy. And this Wardensee was nigh unto ye Foote of Eorlhowe where Dragons dwellt with Chief and alle, over the bones of Dahiric the World-Finder. Nhatain called to him scholars and alle thotful men and womyn of his clan, and many didde com, and with him they said to the Dragons, teach us and wee will learn.
> 
> And these were the first Wardens of the Marche.
> 
> ( _Nillith s'Efteorg's Historie of the Wardency_ , ii, 76.)

"No one's seen King Héal-- I mean, the Lion or the Eagle since the battle last year." The Marchwarder -- Marek, his name was -- had a mustache as ferociously bushy as Freelorn's would one day be, and a slightly nervous air. Hasai hadn't known him well enough to have any idea whether the nervousness was habitual or spurred only by this conversation. He had, once upon a time, been nearly as bad at getting to know humans as he'd been at getting to know his fellow Dragons. In the wrong mood, they all reminded him of his future fate.

"No," he said now, or then. He spoke with courteous clarity; the Marchwarders might learn Draconic from birth, but very few humans could wrap their ears properly around the overtones of natural Dracon speech. Only his _hr'sdaha_ Segnbora had, and she could hardly be counted an ordinary human anymore. "I don't expect you will for some time. They're still adjusting to the change the Immanence granted them, no doubt..."

"So they're not really dead?" The Marchwarder's attention sharpened a little. This was, of course, what he had been angling to ask from the beginning.

Hasai, in memory, repressed a shudder. Out of decorum, Hasai did it again, since he had the first time. The way humans took going _rdahaih_ in stride was still an uncomfortable concept -- of particular concern to many now, when no Dragon had died since the Choice had brought all the _mdeihei_ back to living solidity, and no one was quite sure if they'd be able to go _mdahaih_ again afterward -- but Hasai had been far more horrified by it in the past. Better, he thought now, to live in the world, to do and to be actively, while you had the chance. If you went _rdahaih_ after it -- well, at least you had lived once.

"No," he said. "Not _rdahaih_ , nor _mdahaih_ even in your Goddess. She changed them, though even we can't tell you exactly what they changed into. But I don't think they'll be dying any time soon."

( _Sithesssch_ , you were the one who wanted to meet a human Marchwarder,) he sent to Segnbora. She was waiting just out of manifestion, in Draconic shape as a green-and-gold shadow in the corner of his eye. He let amusement color his mindvoice, though politely he kept his outer _ehhath_ neutral so as not to confuse the human in front of him. (Don't you want to ask anything?)

Strange, still, to have silence where for all the many millennia of his life the _mdeihei_ would have sung their own amusement in chorus inside his head. But they had bodies now too, and their own singular silence to adjust to. Only his _hr'sdaha_ was truly prepared, and that was because she had begun life as not a Dragon at all.

(This is interesting,) she sang at him now. (I'll change it next time.)

It was the future certain she used, the tense employed for events already remembered. Hasai didn't remember yet what she would do next time they recalled this conversation, but he had a sudden clear ahead-memory of her laughter afterward. "I'm afraid I confused him terribly!" she would say through the hissing of her snickers.

He did drop his jaw, in spite of the Marchwarder, so the poor fellow was confused already, as he had not been the first time around. Hasai had been a much more serious Dragon the first time he was alive.

But then, he had been far more alone then, singular or not. It did change a person.

* * *

> When you name something, you pour starlight on its heart. Don't worry overmuch about the details; if you get its name wrong, it will surely tell you later.
> 
> (Draconic saying, trans. d'Welcaen)

  
"Eftgan," said Segnbora with affectionate scorn, "is pulling for Marris. No. She may nickname my child all she likes -- I could hardly stop her, I don't think the Goddess Herself could command Tegánë from playing with names -- but I refuse to give her a say in the original."

"Is that not the perogative of a spouse?" Hasai curled his neck with elaborately bland innocence, looking sideways at his _hr'sdaha_ where she rested in the wide Arlid River. "A fine wife you are."

Her wings were fully spread, their dark webbing stretched across the pasturage on either bank as she soaked in the Sun's light. It was warm and delicious on his scales -- though thinner and paler now at the start of Winter, as it filtered through the atmosphere in the diffuse wide angle that planetary tilt brought. But that had its own piquancy, especially as a change from the rounder light-flavors of Summer. And the air's chill was nothing to a Dragon who had crossed the frozen places between the stars. He had no desire to seek the Summer light of the other hemisphere, even aside from the fact that he had business here.

Unlike his beloved, he was stretched on the grass; she said the cool water eased the baby's kicking in her belly. But now that Hasai was _dav'w'hnesshih_ , solid enough to bite, instead of gone _mdahaih_ inside his _sdaha_ 's mind, he was no longer sympathetically gravid himself. He couldn't say he minded, but there was no cause to tell Segnbora that, at least till after the birth.

She snorted audibly. "Naming by committee, _sithessssch_? If everyone we're married to gets an equal say, we'll be calling her Baby until she's ten."

"Ten years," Hasai pointed out, lazily resettling his wings to better parallel hers, "is infancy still to a Dragon... No matter. What _will_ you name her?"

Segnbora gave him an ironical look. When she had first learned to take Draconic form, she had tried more often than not to copy human expressions on a Dragon's immobile face, and made her _ehhath_ halting and stiff thereby, but she was fluent now: this look was pure Dragon, from the slightly dropped jaw to the cocked tail-tip and slightly tucked-down wing-barbs. The lightless extra barb that was her sword-focus Skádhwë dug a shallow scratch in the soil. "Linaë," she said.

Hasai hissed a triple note of open amusement. The name meant _winged_ in Old Arlen, fitting for the daughter of a Dragon-in-soul even if the baby's father was a child of Lion and not Eagle -- and it was only a little distance off from the Draconic Ll'hnaë. _The near future_ , that meant, the days or weeks ahead, especially when they would be too uneventful to bother remembering ahead of time. Not a usual name, but what did that matter? 

"Fvhr'ielhrnn will be after you to define the senses he doesn't know," he said. Future predictive, certainty without specific forward-memory. He had known Fvhr'ielhrnn, Freelorn as human mouths called him, well enough to predict _that_ long before his then- _sdaha_ had accepted that she had Draconic mindmates.

She flipped her tail-tip now in a gentle curve of unconcerned acquiescence. "Fvhr'ielhrnn can do his own research."

Hasai waited, from habit, for the _mdeihei_ to sing amusement and approval for both of them from their cavern at the back of his mind. But the indwellers no longer dwelled inside. They had their own lives and their own business to be about, and only Hasai himself could sing his feelings to his beloved; so he did.

* * *

> ...dust-red, heart-hot,  
>  that cradled our eggs  
>  and warmed our infant bones  
>  with the light of its Sun  
>  fierce heat, deep joy, power in its youth and its dying;  
>  with its caverns that cradled us over the molten core,  
>  with its red-brown mountains thrusting high in broken crags,  
>  with its cracked valleys and lakes of Sun-red sand.  
>  O lost Home,  
>  that burned _rdahaih_ with the ashes of our forebears' bodies,  
>  and left us their souls for the dark frozen Crossing...
> 
> (from _Songs of the Dragons_ , trans. d'Welcaen)

He had been a quiet Dragoncel. Later he had learned like a good Dragon to bury in placidity his fear of the terrifying ahead-memory that would shape his life, the memory of going _mdahaih_ amidst dark and cold and agony in an alien _sdaha_ who was certain she would go _rdahaih_ with him and all the rest of their _mdeiheih_. He had been quiet in those later years, too: quiet, and placid, and aloof from even his _mdeiheih_. But in his youth on the Homeworld, when he had only recently come to language and sentience and _sdahaih_ , he had not yet learned aloofness; he had been quiet then from the fear that shadowed him.

All he had remembered ahead had come to pass, inevitably. And, just as inevitably, it had not come to pass quite as he had expected at the time, and it held no fear for him now. That _sdaha_ , once so terrifyingly alien, was familiar and beloved both. And Hasai was alone in truth, without a single _mdaha_ to share his mind, as his kind had not been since their earliest days when the Homeworld too was a softer place.

He had returned in memory already to its red stone and violet sunsets with Segnbora, companioned then by her loving presence. But Dragons have the privilege (and the danger) of dwelling in memory again and again, experiencing it anew each time.

He wanted this time to see his lost first Home as he was now: alone, but loved and known, and content.

Hasai curled his tail comfortable around the wind-carved base of the mountain spire he rested on. It bore his bulk easily, for Dragons are lighter than their size would suggest to a species not designed for flight and sun-eating, and every mountain of the Homeworld had been reshaped and reinforced a thousand times. Geology is one of the most rewarding games for Dragons, and the Homeworld had no other life to be guarded and constrain their play.

The Sun set, huge and pinkish, swollen with its dying fires, into a sea of deep purple and black. To Hasai's left, far beyond the curving horizon, rose the great spiraled star-swirl called _Stih'Hhao_ , the World's Heart. The nighttime cold of the Homeworld's thin dry air tingled on his throat and the folded membranes of his wings, but the Home-Sun's rays even at sunset were a welcome draft. Familiar and full of deep subtle nuance, so different from the equally beloved coziness of the yellow soft Sun over the world of _rhhw'hei_...

Hasai sang a soft quintuple chord of contentment, and lifted his head closer to the Starlight. 

On another mountaintop far away, another form in star-ruby and milkstone did the same. One of his own _mdaha_ -that-was, Hasai thought, old Adhasss, here in memory herself.

 _O Immanence,_ he thought, _thank You for giving us two homes worth fighting for._

* * *

>   
> _Stihë hë-stihé._  
>  What is, is.  
>  _Stihú hë-stihé._  
>  What was, is.  
>  _Stihú sta'stiha._  
>  What was, will be.  
>  _Sta'stihá hu-stihú._  
>  What will be, was.  
>  _Stihë hu-stihuw._  
>  What is, was not.  
>  _Haa'ae najh'stihëh. Naur'i'rae hnnou'An'dzat!_  
>  All of these are illusions. Seek the Truth beneath!
> 
> ( _The Lore of Marchwardens_ , xv, 17, trans. s'Freelorn)

Hasai spread his wings over the tiled roof of Blackcastle. At full extension his furthest wingtips hung over the gutters to either side, giving him the whole of the roof to rest his wing-struts on. Delicate gusts of snow swirled in the air, reminding him of the Heart of the World that hung over the Homeworld.

In the building below, Segnbora was intently discussing taxation rates and grain storehouses with their husband Wyn. Hasai had briefly thought of contributing, but although it was both interesting and important work, he was well aware that Segnbora was using the conversation mostly to take her mind off how very much she wanted her child to be born. Young Linaë seemed to have inherited stubbornness from both her parents, and was quite content where she was. In grumpier moments, Segnbora accused Freelorn of being a bad influence on their daughter even in utero.

(I can hear you thinking that,) she sent to him now, with suppressed amusement under her mindvoice. (You're perfectly correct, but you can stop that anyway. Besides, this Winter's grain is important. We did fight a war through some of the harvest...)

Hasai hissed amusement. ( _Sithesssch_ ,) he sent back as a thought struck him, (what about the stores over by Prelidh? You said they had a good harvest, and that area's well clear of most of this past year's work. Transportation's no difficulty if they can package up a load for you or I to fly.)

(Now there's a thought.) And she was off again. Hasai laughed softly in the Winter sunlight.

He turned his gaze to the courtyard below. Its cobblestones had been swept clean of snow twice today already, but more was scattered across it in a thin wind-tossed layer. And suddenly, as it sometimes did, ahead-memory came upon him.

Hasai was lounging on that courtyard in full Summer, his wings folded closely and his tail tucked about him. It would have been a very humble posture among Dragons, but here he was mostly trying to keep himself out of the way of the horses and carts that came and went through the wide open door. In front of him was a young human child in a green smock. She had dark curling hair and Freelorn's nose that had been Héalhra's nose too, and she was small and slim and gangling as humans went. Eleven or twelve, Hasai thought vaguely, though he wasn't very good at human ages.

"Mama says," Linaë told him, "that if I want to know what's past the Waste, I should ask you."

"What do you want to know about it?" Hasai asked her gravely, in the future.

" _Everything_ ," Linaë said, with the impatient sincerity of a child. "Nobody knows anything. Even Papa Herewiss has only been _to_ the Waste, and not _past_ it. But Mama said there's lots of world beyond there, and you've seen it."

So would Segnbora have, he thought -- but perhaps only recently or rarely, and before Linaë's birth only through Hasai's memories. "Very well," Hasai said, and lowered his head to her, and gaped his jaws open. He kept the Dragonfire at the back of his throat smoldering very low indeed.

Linaë beamed in fearless triumph, and put her young hand into the Dragon's mouth. He closed his jaws very gently, and brought them both back into a memory of flying high over the world –

And the memory ended.

Well, there was time enough for it to happen. (She will have your eyes, _sithesssch_ ,) he sent in future certainty, and relaxed into the snowy Winter's sunlight.

**Author's Note:**

> **Glossary of important Draconic terms:**
> 
> _mdaha:_ literally "indweller," a dead Dragon existing as a sort of ghost inside the head of another Dragon (usually but not always his/her descendent). Plural _mdeihei_ , state of being _mdahaih_  
>  _sdaha:_ literally "outdweller," a living Dragon (or, uh, Segnbora) who is host to the _mdeihei_. Plural _sdeihei_ , state of being _sdahaih_.  
>  _hr':_ an augmentary prefix, modifying a word to mean that something is "more than" or just "different from" its usual meaning.  
>  _rdahaih:_ state of dying without going _mdahaih_ , regarded by Dragons as a horrifying loss.  
>  _sithesssch:_ "beloved."  
>  _ehhath:_ Draconic body language, which carries considerably more semantic weight than its human equivalent.


End file.
